o'clock, he found him crying as one whose heart will break.

It was not till the third day that he ventured to go out. There was
something in the clear, pine-scented air of that winter morning that
seemed to bring him back his joyousness and his ardour for life. But it
was not merely the physical conditions of environment that had caused
the change. His own nature had revolted against the excess of anguish
that had sought to maim and mar the perfection of its calm. With subtle
and finely wrought temperaments it is always so. Their strong passions
must either bruise or bend. They either slay the man, or themselves die.
Shallow sorrows and shallow loves live on. The loves and sorrows that
are great are destroyed by their own plenitude. Besides, he had
convinced himself that he had been the victim of a terror-stricken
imagination, and looked back now on his fears with something of pity and
not a little of contempt.

After breakfast, he walked with the duchess for an hour in the garden
and then drove across the park to join the shooting-party. The crisp
frost lay like salt upon the grass. The sky was an inverted cup of blue
metal. A thin film of ice bordered the flat, reed-grown lake.

At the corner of the pine-wood he caught sight of Sir Geoffrey Clouston,
the duchess's brother, jerking two spent cartridges out of his gun. He
jumped from the cart, and having told the groom to take the mare home,
made his way towards his guest through the withered bracken and rough
undergrowth.

"Have you had good sport, Geoffrey?" he asked.

"Not very good, Dorian. I think most of the birds have gone to the open.
I dare say it will be better after lunch, when we get to new ground."

Dorian strolled along by his side. The keen aromatic air, the brown and
red lights that glimmered in the wood, the hoarse cries of the beaters
ringing out from time to time, and the sharp snaps of the guns that
followed, fascinated him and filled him with a sense of delightful
freedom. He was dominated by the carelessness of happiness, by the high
indifference of joy.

Suddenly from a lumpy tussock of old grass some twenty yards in front of
them, with black-tipped ears erect and long hinder limbs throwing it
forward, started a hare. It bolted for a thicket of alders. Sir Geoffrey
put his gun to his shoulder, but there was something in the animal's
grace of movement that strangely charmed Dorian Gray, and he cried out
at once, "Don't shoot it, Geoffrey. Let it live."

"What nonsense, Dorian!" laughed his companion, and as the hare bounded
into the thicket, he fired. There were two cries heard, the cry of a
hare in pain, which is dreadful, the cry of a man in agony, which is worse.

"Good heavens! I have hit a beater!" exclaimed Sir Geoffrey. "What an
ass the man was to get in front of the guns! Stop shooting there!" he
called out at the top of his voice. "A man is hurt."

The head-keeper came running up with a stick in his hand.

"Where, sir? Where is he?" he shouted. At the same time, the firing
ceased along the line.

"Here," answered Sir Geoffrey angrily, hurrying towards the thicket.
"Why on earth don't you keep your men back? Spoiled my shooting for the
day."

Dorian watched them as they plunged into the alder-clump, brushing the
lithe swinging branches aside. In a few moments they emerged, dragging a
body after them into the sunlight. He turned away in horror. It seemed
to him that misfortune followed wherever he went. He heard Sir Geoffrey
ask if the man was really dead, and the affirmative answer of the
keeper. The wood seemed to him to have become suddenly alive with faces.
There was the trampling of myriad feet and the low buzz of voices. A
great copper-breasted pheasant came beating through the boughs overhead.

After a few moments--that were to him, in his perturbed state, like
endless hours of pain--he felt a hand laid on his shoulder. He started
and looked round.

"Dorian," said Lord Henry, "I had better tell them that the shooting is
stopped for to-day. It would not look well to go on."

"I wish it were stopped for ever, Harry," he answered bitterly. "The
whole thing is hideous and cruel. Is the man ... ?"

He could not finish the sentence.

"I am afraid so," rejoined Lord Henry. "He got the whole charge of shot
in his chest. He must have died almost instantaneously. Come; let us go
home."

They walked side by side in the direction of the avenue for nearly fifty
yards without speaking. Then Dorian looked at Lord Henry and said, with
a heavy sigh, "It is a bad omen, Harry, a very bad omen."

"What is?" asked Lord Henry. "Oh! this accident, I suppose. My dear
fellow, it can't be helped. It was the man's own fault. Why did he get
in front of the guns? Besides, it is nothing to us. It is rather awkward
for Geoffrey, of course. It does not do to pepper beaters. It makes
people think that one is a wild shot. And Geoffrey is not; he shoots
very straight. But there is no use talking about the matter."

Dorian shook his head. "It is a bad omen, Harry. I feel as if something


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